With a name like “Destroy This Place” and sporting a font in the title sequence that might feel at home on an Earache Records album cover, no one would blame you for being ready to toss up some metal hornz as you queued up this track, Graves.

I find it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the music being released these days. And, perhaps due to my increasingly crotchety old man disposition, I find myself favoring old-timey indie rock (although, I still enjoy plenty of current music, as you’ll see below).

So, without any further caveats, here is some of the music (and music-related) stuff I liked from this past year:

Lately, I’ve been noticing this bit of grammatical trickery floating around the internets, often in the following form:

Best. Day. Ever.

I often see it associated with gaming/comic/nerd culture. For example, a recent episode of Heroes used this particular phrase during a subtitled portion of Hiro’s dialogue, which was spoken in Japanese. In the same scene, Seth Green’s character utters the phrase out loud, with dramatic pauses in between each word (as the periods after each word would seem to dictate).